According to the acting director of the Department of Homeland Security, terrorist groups like the Islamic State and al Qaeda are busying themselves with small-scale attacks while they plan a larger, more sensational attack to unleash on the West. DHS Acting Secretary Elaine Duke told the U.S. Embassy in London that authorities should be on full alert for a larger-scale attack coming soon.

“The terrorist organizations, be it ISIS or others, want to have the big explosion like they did on 9/11,” Duke said. “They want to take down aircraft. The intelligence is clear on that.”

Duke told the intelligence authorities at the embassy that these groups were planning to create terror using small scale attacks in London while furthering the development of what she called a “major aviation plot.”

“Terrorists are strong, they are adaptable and the terrorist threat is the highest it has been since pre-9/11,” she said. “We have got to have every tool that’s possible.”

Duke’s comments came on the heels of a startling warning from Andrew Parker, the head of the British security services organization, MI5. Parker said that the UK was currently in the midst of a terrorist onslaught that was both unprecedented and unparalleled in its explosive fury.

“The threat is multidimensional, evolving rapidly, and operating at a scale and pace we have not seen before,” Parker warned. “We have seen a dramatic upshift in the threat this year. It’s the highest tempo I have seen in my 34-year career. Today there is more terrorist activity, coming at us more quickly, and it can be harder to detect.

“The threat is more diverse than I’ve ever known,” he continued. “Plots developed here in the UK, but plots directed from overseas as well. Plots online, complex scheming and also crude stabbings, lengthy planning, but also spontaneous attacks.”

Parker said that small bands of Islamic jihadists were able to build bombs and strategize attacks using information off the internet, dramatically cutting down on the amount of time needed to move a terrorist attack from the inception stage through to execution. And in shortening that window, he said, the jihadists made it ever more difficult for police and MI5 to stop the attacks in advance.

The rising problem of terrorism in and around London has attracted criticism from security-minded conservatives and even a few well-known British celebrities. Oasis star Noel Gallagher told Rolling Stone last week that he’d had it up to here with the British government and their seeming inability to effectively address the problem.

“I have children and they’re growing up in London and they take the tube, I take the tube – we all take public transport because I can’t drive.,” Gallagher said. “And there’s bombers roaming free around the whole f**king city and the government and the one before them and the one after that will be powerless to stop it because of some hippy ideal about people’s religious beliefs.”

Gallagher is not alone in his frustration with the politically correct attitudes preventing Western governments from doing what is necessary to protect their citizens. In his words are echoes of the sentiments that led to Austria’s pull to the right in their recent elections, Marine Le Pen’s near-upset in the French elections, and, of course, Donald Trump’s victory in November. Until liberals realize that their namby-pamby outreach to Muslims is costing people their lives, their influence over Western civilization will continue to wane.